Impossible Colors: See Hues that can't exist

Engineers often load a structure with weight until it collapses or shake it until it flies apart. Like engineers, many scientists also have a secret love for destructive testing—the more catastrophic the failure, the better. Human vision researchers avoid irreversible failures (and lawsuits) but find reversible failures fascinating and instructive—and sometimes even important, as with the devastating spatial disorientations and visual blackouts that military pilots can experience. At the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the two of us explore the most catastrophic visual failures we can arrange. We create conditions in which people see images flowing like hot wax and fragmenting like a shattered mosaic. Here, we tell the story of the two most intriguing perceptual breakdowns we have studied: forbidden colors and biased geometric hallucinations.

Have you ever seen the color bluish yellow? We do not mean green. Some greens may appear bluish and others may appear yellow-tinged, but no green (or any other color) ever appears both bluish and yellowish at the same moment. And have you ever seen reddish green? We do not mean the muddy brown that might come from mixing paints, or the yellow that comes from combining red and green light, or the texture of a pointillist's field of red and green dots. We mean a single color that looks reddish and greenish at the same time, in the same place.